Vision
I think a world with less addictive phones is possible and not too far away. This timeline is one plausible route from here to there. Past milestones are things that have actually happened. Future ones are what I'm currently betting on.
Survey of existing tools
Freedom, Opal, Forest, Light Phone, every screen-time dashboard. None of them work, in the sense that if any of them did we’d all be using it.
Public brainstorms begin
The idea stops being a private intuition. A handful of Google Meets with friends (@zencephalon, @Samswoora, @Tautologer, @arcove, @charmcgi) — trading UI ideas, pressure-testing the framing, getting the first real sense of which parts of the thesis survive contact with other people’s intuitions.
View and contribute to the brainstorm board →Early mockups
Two attempts at giving the idea something physical to argue with: a 3D-printed phone case weighted with steel (does a heavier phone get put down sooner?), and an iMovie mockup of a phone gradually desaturating as you scroll.
Data collection & experiments
De-risking the core hypotheses by making them testable. This is the step where collaboration would most help — arguments, data, people who want to run experiments alongside me.
- ArgOS 2026 — a clickable mobile mockup, presence-style visual treatments layered on top of the apps you already use.
- The Scroll Lab — a Chrome extension applying live visual transformations to X, now logging anonymous scroll and session data so "does this actually change behavior" can start to have numbers attached to it.
- ArgOS 2028 — the more ambitious version, same phone one step further, with an AI-assembled Discover feed.
Forking Android
The next step feels like building ArgOS on a LineageOS fork. The experiment that answers how much further you can get if you’re not bound by Android’s restrictions on what a phone is allowed to do for you.
A phone someone could buy
Priced above an iPhone, justified not by specs but by the hours of life it returns. Two things it does well: filter what reaches you (a bouncer), and surface what actually matters (an assistant who pays attention).
Evidence, not just conviction
A small fleet in the wild. Real usage data. A/B results that move people who aren’t already convinced.
More time, and collaborators
Dedicating more of my own time to this, and finding the people aligned enough to work on it alongside me.
The cascade
In a world where this project is really successful, one manufacturer ships care structurally — not as a wellness toggle, the way encryption is now. The others follow or explain why they won’t. Google and Apple’s ad revenue takes a real hit, roughly equal to the gift users get back. Good trade.